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 minimalism


VanillaNet: the Power of Minimalism in Deep Learning (Supplementary Material)

Neural Information Processing Systems

The detailed architecture for VanillaNet with 7-13 layers can be found in Table 1, where each convolutional layer is followed with an activation function. For the VanillaNet-13-1.5, the number of channels are multiplied with 1.5. For classification on ImageNet, we train the VanillaNets for 300 epochs utilizing the cosine learning rate decay [5]. The λis linearly decayed from 1 to 0 on epoch 0 and 100, respectively. The training details can be fould in Table 2.


VanillaNet: the Power of Minimalism in Deep Learning (Supplementary Material)

Neural Information Processing Systems

Figure 1: Visualization of attention maps of the classified samples by ResNet-50 and V anillaNet-9. Cutmix: Regularization strategy to train strong classifiers with localizable features.


VanillaNet: the Power of Minimalism in Deep Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

At the heart of foundation models is the philosophy of more is different, exemplified by the astonishing success in computer vision and natural language processing. However, the challenges of optimization and inherent complexity of transformer models call for a paradigm shift towards simplicity. In this study, we introduce VanillaNet, a neural network architecture that embraces elegance in design. By avoiding high depth, shortcuts, and intricate operations like self-attention, VanillaNet is refreshingly concise yet remarkably powerful. Each layer is carefully crafted to be compact and straightforward, with nonlinear activation functions pruned after training to restore the original architecture. VanillaNet overcomes the challenges of inherent complexity, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments. Its easy-to-understand and highly simplified architecture opens new possibilities for efficient deployment. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that VanillaNet delivers performance on par with renowned deep neural networks and vision transformers, showcasing the power of minimalism in deep learning. This visionary journey of VanillaNet has significant potential to redefine the landscape and challenge the status quo of foundation model, setting a new path for elegant and effective model design.


'Upon This Quote I Will Build My Church Thesis'

Communications of the ACM

With this word, Leibniz famously enjoined the reader to compute. Contemporary logicians took this motto as a founding principle after the progressive discovery of the proof-as-program correspondence. This major breakthrough, also known as the Curry-Howard equivalence, is the seemingly simple observation that proofs and programs are the same object, in an essential way. One major offshoot of the Curry-Howard philosophical stance is Martin-Löf's type theory (MLTT), the theoretical underpinning of several widely used proof assistants such as Agda, Coq, or Lean.16 In these systems, there is no formal separation between proofs and programs, as they live in the same syntax and obey the same rules.


Review for NeurIPS paper: Generating Correct Answers for Progressive Matrices Intelligence Tests

Neural Information Processing Systems

Weaknesses: My first concern is that this model seems far from minimalism. Generating correct answer for RPM is an interesting task. But one of the reasons it is interesting to the current AI community is that humans can somehow generate some results correctly without huge amount of training. Although this work demonstrates the possibility of generator that can show some reasoning capability, I highly speculate that this is a distillation from the subnetworks for context extraction, which is trained with strong supervision. There is still a long distance from this model and human brain. The latter one is believed to be designed by nature following minimalism.


Is it the end of (generative) linguistics as we know it?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A significant debate has emerged in response to a paper written by Steven Piantadosi (Piantadosi, 2023) and uploaded to the LingBuzz platform, the open archive for generative linguistics. Piantadosi's dismissal of Chomsky's approach is ruthless, but generative linguists deserve it. In this paper, I will adopt three idealized perspectives -- computational, theoretical, and experimental -- to focus on two fundamental issues that lend partial support to Piantadosi's critique: (a) the evidence challenging the Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) hypothesis and (b) the notion of simplicity as conceived within mainstream Minimalism. In conclusion, I argue that, to reclaim a central role in language studies, generative linguistics -- representing a prototypical theoretical perspective on language -- needs a serious update leading to (i) more precise, consistent, and complete formalizations of foundational intuitions and (ii) the establishment and utilization of a standardized dataset of crucial empirical evidence to evaluate the theory's adequacy. On the other hand, ignoring the formal perspective leads to major drawbacks in both computational and experimental approaches. Neither descriptive nor explanatory adequacy can be easily achieved without the precise formulation of general principles that can be challenged empirically.


VanillaNet: the Power of Minimalism in Deep Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

At the heart of foundation models is the philosophy of "more is different", exemplified by the astonishing success in computer vision and natural language processing. However, the challenges of optimization and inherent complexity of transformer models call for a paradigm shift towards simplicity. In this study, we introduce VanillaNet, a neural network architecture that embraces elegance in design. By avoiding high depth, shortcuts, and intricate operations like self-attention, VanillaNet is refreshingly concise yet remarkably powerful. Each layer is carefully crafted to be compact and straightforward, with nonlinear activation functions pruned after training to restore the original architecture.


Explanation-based Belief Revision: Moving Beyond Minimalism to Explanatory Understanding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In belief revision, agents typically modify their beliefs when they receive some new piece of information that is in conflict with them. The guiding principle behind most belief revision frameworks is that of minimalism, which advocates minimal changes to existing beliefs. However, minimalism may not necessarily capture the nuanced ways in which human agents reevaluate and modify their beliefs. In contrast, the explanatory hypothesis indicates that people are inherently driven to seek explanations for inconsistencies, thereby striving for explanatory coherence rather than minimal changes when revising beliefs. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold. Motivated by the explanatory hypothesis, we first present a novel, yet simple belief revision operator that, given a belief base and an explanation for an explanandum, it revises the belief bases in a manner that preserves the explanandum and is not necessarily minimal. We call this operator explanation-based belief revision. Second, we conduct two human-subject studies to empirically validate our approach and investigate belief revision behavior in real-world scenarios. Our findings support the explanatory hypothesis and provide insights into the strategies people employ when resolving inconsistencies.


Old and New Minimalism: a Hopf algebra comparison

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper we compare some old formulations of Minimalism, in particular Stabler's computational minimalism, and Chomsky's new formulation of Merge and Minimalism, from the point of view of their mathematical description in terms of Hopf algebras. We show that the newer formulation has a clear advantage purely in terms of the underlying mathematical structure. More precisely, in the case of Stabler's computational minimalism, External Merge can be described in terms of a partially defined operated algebra with binary operation, while Internal Merge determines a system of right-ideal coideals of the Loday-Ronco Hopf algebra and corresponding right-module coalgebra quotients. This mathematical structure shows that Internal and External Merge have significantly different roles in the old formulations of Minimalism, and they are more difficult to reconcile as facets of a single algebraic operation, as desirable linguistically. On the other hand, we show that the newer formulation of Minimalism naturally carries a Hopf algebra structure where Internal and External Merge directly arise from the same operation. We also compare, at the level of algebraic properties, the externalization model of the new Minimalism with proposals for assignments of planar embeddings based on heads of trees.


A Robot Wrote This Podcast: Meditation and Mindfulness, As Told By AI by Enough-ism

#artificialintelligence

Artificial intelligence in action is still in its infancy. When AI seems real, human, and like someone you'd trust, it's a perplexing reaction. You can tell that Alexa or Siri is a bot, for instance, but what if you couldn't actually tell an AI-generated podcast from one that was entirely human-created? This podcast--created by podcast producer Rev. Yugen Bond alongside some snarky robots--was written with AI technology. It's a fascinating glimpse into what AI potentially holds for content creation. ABOUT THE PODCAST: This minimalist wants more. Enough-ism is about having enough, already. The world is experiencing an awakening. This podcast about mindfulness, meditation, and minimalism is your modern toolkit to keep your spirit right and your soul bright. One candle can light a fire. ABOUT THE HOST: Reverend Yugen Bond is an author and reiki master with a master’s in metaphysical sciences. She once despised meditation, had both too much and nothing to wear, and didn't know how to slow down her thoughts. What a journey it's been. Time to share it with the world, especially with you. CONTACT INFO:  Can’t get enough of Enough-ism? Follow @IAmEnoughism and visit IAmEnoughism.com | Support the show: Buy the "Enough-ism: This Minimalist Wants More" e-book now on Amazon Kindle! For business inquiries, guest requests, and speaking engagements, email enoughismpodcast@gmail.com.